There are, of course, technical differences between Internet and Outernet (see Table). But the cultural differences are far more interesting to most, just as whether you can get from Oxford to Manchester in the evening is more interesting to most than how the brakes on the train work. (You can't; and an answer to the second is available on donation of a quilted outer-garment to a homeless charity.)

The sharpest of these cultural differences is in the acceptance of new developments and "standards". The Internet operates a kind of instantaneous peer review. Until now, many new services have been developed using public funding and made available freely.

The World-Wide Web, for example, was developed at the European high-energy physics lab CERN, and it's probably best not to ask how much CERN's paymasters knew or understood about the work. Word spread through electronic mail and newsgroup messages -- "hey, check this out!". Within a year it became ubiquitous and the most colourful face of the net.

Outernet deals with money and business communications; so it is necessarily relies on the careful development of rigorous standards. These may spend years in committees of the CCITT and (now) the International Telecommunications Union. Whatever the possible failings of, say, cash machines, such a rigorous process is much less scary than cash machines working to Internet standards of reliability would be. ("Your money is undeliverable because of jargon. Attempts to re-deliver it will be made over the next 48 hours.")

To the Internet enthusiast, though, standards are rigid and generally clunky. Take one part of Outernet visible to civilians: the scheme for addressing individuals in the X.400 messaging standard. Where Internet addresses are often whimsical and arbitrary, X.400 addresses are, in principle, rigorously logical and hierarchically structured. But X.400 addresses were never designed for humans to see or to tinker with -- they can be verbose. When they're stretched to deal with communication between disparate systems, they can become extremely obscure.

Or take the ways the two nets deliver information services. The World Wide Web has achieved its phenomenal growth by people independently bolting on their latest neat idea. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. Too often the site from which you request information is busy. In the extreme, running the same search twice in succession can turn up different results. Meandering with a purpose may be the best way to search -- but you can never be sure that failure to find something means it's not there.

The quintessential Outernet information service may be the FT's Profile database. The full text of all the UK broadsheets is available for free-text searching -- at prices starting from 60p per minute. Searches are dependable and repeatable: if Profile says there are no articles which include both the phrase "Home Secretary" and the phrase "resigned today", there aren't any -- unless the piece appeared in a weekend supplement which isn't on- line.

Services delivered over the Internet glue together, as thoroughly as time allows, what's available right now. Services delivered over Outernet are planned over years in committees and IT departments, to exchange data between centres and their peripheries (Profile and researchers; banks and their cash machines).

People belonging to the two cultures often simply fail to understand each other. A very large organisation sponsors a research project intended to discover the effect of IT on "teleworkers". It demands answers about the suitability of standards for Electronic Document Interchange, and cost-benefit analyses. Real teleworkers, meanwhile, muddle through using whatever works. Some invent new economic activities -- so that historical comparisons make as much sense as a cost-benefit analysis of the use of movable type to produce illuminated psalteries.

When people from the two cultures meet, mutual annihilation is on the agenda. IT managers are liable to ask about the World-Wide Web, "who has editorial control of it?" When they get the answer "everyone takes responsibility for their own pages," mutterings about "propeller-heads" can be heard. The response from the Internetties -- that they're just going to have to change a large part of their organisational culture, right now -- misses a large part of the argument too.

This incomprehension is currently crippling crucial debates about policy towards the Infobahn. The Infobahn is not the Internet. Nor, yet, is it Outernet. It is an idea still in the making, and in a sense the two cultures are battling for hegemony.

At least to those who hope that the Infobahn will provide a genuinely new expression of human culture, with near-instant many-to-many communication, entirely new modes of publishing, and thus and so, the battle is crucial. The hierarchical and clearly- structured thinking built into Outernet may make for reliability of data transport. But it also prioritises traditional one-to- many communication. The idea of writing a formal standard to guarantee 100% reliability in a vast peer-to-peer service like the Web is patently ridiculous, and probably logically impossible.

Thus far, the Internet has outstripped Outernet in public awareness because of its flexibility and near-instant adoption of interesting new methods. But will the public access points to the Infobahn makes it easy only to be an Outernet-style consumer -- reliably to access traditional movies and home shopping? How hard will they make it to be an Internet-style participant, to put up your own Web page for example? The question is much more important than a conflict between propeller-heads, because the answer will influence the development of real-life cultures.

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Written:
14 January 1995

An edited and doubtless thus improved version of this article appeared in the Guardian OnLine section.

This version is © copyright 1995-96 Mike Holderness; moral rights are asserted.